Saturday, October 31, 2009

I moved to New York City in August of 2000 and lived there until the winter of 03'-'04. A relatively short stint by most New Yorkers standards, but it was the first city I lived in post-college and therefore holds a very, very special place in my heart. I lived with 5 other guys my junior and senior years in college but wanted to strike out on my own when I got to the city. I found a tiny little place in Little Italy (Mulberry between Broome and Grand to be exact), began to explore the neighborhood, and eventually found the steel-doored vault that is B-4 It Was Cool. I never knew until that day that I was attracted to old stuff - especially of the American industrial variety that B-4 happened to specialize in. Run by Gadi Gilan - a big, burly Eastern European badass - B-4 It Was Cool started my fascination with old America and eventually led me to leave the music industry, move to Austin, become an antique dealer, and the rest is history. I don't ever plan on leaving this business. It provides an amazing insight into a bygone America that will never, ever return, and everyday I'm thankful I found it. I have this man to thank for the introduction.

But of course it's for the Japanese market only. The stuff Lee makes for the U.S. market is, in all honesty, pretty lame. The pieces they make for Europe and Japan, however, are really great looking. I want this jacket:

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Monday, October 26, 2009

I bought a new scanner today and while these aren't the most perfect of scans, it's nice to have a machine that halfway does the trick. My last one had crapped out completely. These are images of guitar and mandolin strings and packaging from Germany. In English, but from Germany. And old. I recently bought a bunch of thick old glass jars full of strings and these are what I found inside. This is the stuff that completely freaks me out:

p.s. - I realize I could probably get better images from a camera, but there's something about watching that weird white light pass across the glass that forced me to scan these instead of snap pictures.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

This is rough stuff. I hope you have your stomachs ready. From photographer Chris Jordan's website: "These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent." Wow.

Stop throwing shit in the street, out the window, or elsewhere. Town Lake in Austin is disgustingly dirty after a hard rain, and the same goes for our oceans. These pictures are only a tiny sliver of the larger mess that obviously can't be photographed en masse.

This commercial doesn't fit the usual bill of my blog, but it features one of my best friends on Earth (John Beach), and the tagline is a pretty great mantra for life - especially for those of us who literally spend much of our lives on the road: